


turned our future upside down

by thaliasgrace



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Band Fic, M/M, basically it’s a band and soulmate au bc why not, can’t really do these tags at all whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 02:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13448607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thaliasgrace/pseuds/thaliasgrace
Summary: Will likes the idea of soulmates. Really. But when his starts to play Mulan at three in the morning, it starts to get a little annoying.[BAND AU AND SOULMATE AU.]





	turned our future upside down

**Author's Note:**

> A band AU / soulmate AU because hey, two of my fave things combined. Here’s a playlist of the songs that inspired me / I was listening to because hey, music fic means a playlist, right?

Some people say that having a soulmate is relaxing. Some people say that the music that plays in their ears makes them feel relaxed. Makes them feel happy. 

They don’t have Will’s soulmate. 

Will is pretty sure his soulmate hates him. He plays music (really loud music) at one in the morning. Constantly. Will gets woken up by it.

It’s not even good music. Honestly. His soulmate has varied music taste- but the three am music is always Disney songs. 

Always. 

So Will is woken up at three in the fucking morning by Mulan songs. (Really? Really? Mulan is a great film, but if you’re going to listen to Disney, clearly you should at least listen to the Jungle Book soundtrack. Or The Little Mermaid. Or, honestly, anything but I’ll Make a Man Out Of You. Every fucking night.) 

Sometimes his music is in Italian, calm and soothing. That’s nice, Will supposes, And whenever that starts he turns off whatever he’s listening to and listens to that instead. He doesn’t know what any of the music is called, and even if he did he wouldn’t know how to spell any of it, and so he hopes his soulmate will realise he likes it and play it more. He doubts that’ll happen, though. As evidenced by Mulan at three every night, his soulmate seems like a kind of asshole. 

Besides, everyone knows that nobody can really communicate properly through soulmates. You just have to hope they understand what you mean when you play ‘Fuck You’ when they (and by extension, you) are listening to Mulan again. Or you have to hope they know what you mean when you play cheerful songs when all they can listen to is sad music. 

Sometimes he listens to music that Will likes. Sometimes he’ll be listening to something and switch it off when Will starts playing something, and that always makes Will smile. Sometimes he listens to angry rap music, but only for half an hour or so. Maybe it’s a gym thing. Will does that, too, and the idea that they’re similar, even in that small insignificant way, makes him smile.

Sometimes it’s classical music. Sometimes it’s properly angry music, stuff that Will’s sister Kayla would call ‘emo’ if she could hear it. My Chemical Romance and all that. 

It’s good she can’t. Will doesn’t tell his siblings much about his soulmate, and they don’t tell him much about theirs. It’s very private, and he doesn’t really want them to make fun of his soulmate for the Disney or for the Italian and classical stuff, even though he groans about it all the time to himself. 

It’s different when it’s him. Will feels oddly protective over his soulmate, considering he’s never met him. 

Maybe it’s the fact for him to be up at three, he has to be an insomniac or be plagued by nightmares like Will is sometimes. Maybe it’s the way some days he listens to music that's exclusively sad, so sad on occasion Will had been know to pause whatever he’s doing and listen to it, sometimes letting a tear or two slide down his cheeks. Maybe it’s the way that there was that one week that Will thought he was dead because there was no music at all, and he searched the Internet for an hour for a song titled ‘Are You Okay?’ and got a ‘Yes’ response back minutes later before it was all silent again. 

And then there’s that week in May where his soulmate listens to exclusively Italian music and nothing else, not even his usual three am Disney, and Will thinks that maybe that’s an anniversary of something and he tries not to listen to anything then, because, hey, he knows what grief feels like, and it sucks. 

Sometimes he wishes he was able to see his soulmate, talk to them, just to tell them they’ll be okay. That’s the thing- he tries to find songs like that, songs that say what he feels, but he can’t, really. It sucks. It really sucks. 

He guesses that’s where it starts. That need to express himself, that need to tell his soulmate (and, he guesses, the world) what he really feels. He’s sick of going through the Internet to find songs that sum up his mood perfectly. He’s tired of trying to find songs that’ll tell his soulmate that he’s sorry, and he wishes he was there. 

So he writes one instead. He keeps it private, because, hey, he thinks that it’s good, but he doesn’t really know and he doesn’t want to show anyone and have them laugh. 

Plus, it’s… Well, it’s not a romantic song, per say. It’s not about how much he wishes his soulmate was there with him- it’s about how much he wishes he was with his soulmate, and not for any huge romantic reason. It’s just because he wishes he could help. 

So he keeps the song in his sock drawer, because why not? Who would look for anything private in his sock drawer, for fuck’s sake? 

As it turns out, Will has shitty friends, because when Cecil comes over he finds it and reads it and declares that it’s ‘fucking brilliant, Will, why didn’t you show this to me?’ 

When Will responds with a “because you’re a fucking idiot, get out of my sock drawer,” Cecil throws a pair of socks at him. 

Will thinks that’s it, but it’s not. 

Cecil recruits friends. He gets Nyssa, Cecil’s ex-girlfriend (because hey, that’s not fucking weird) Lou Ellen, a girl who- well, Will doesn’t even know what she is to Cecil- and the Stoll brothers. And just like that, they have a band, and Will isn’t even sure that this is what he wants. 

He likes the spotlight. It’s an inherited trait from his dad, one he kind of wishes he didn’t have, and he can sing pretty well (if he does say so himself) but that doesn’t mean that he should join a band. 

“I was going to go to med school,” Will tells Cecil, and they sit down and they talk, because Cecil feels bad and apparently Lou Ellen told him that this will never work if Will isn’t 100% on board. 

Cecil says Will can leave if he wants to, and he kind of fucked up not really asking Will about reading his song and also about creating the whole band, and Will looks him right in the eyes and thinks of med school. 

And then he thinks of how he loves Biology, sure, and the idea of helping people, but he also loves the idea of this. A band. Singing his songs. Maybe finding his soulmate through the entire thing. 

He can be in a band and then go to med school, but he can’t go to med school and then be in a band. 

And if he doesn’t do this he’ll regret it for the rest of his life. He’ll be haunted by what ifs.

And so he’s in a band. 

He wants to tell his soulmate. That’s what he thinks at first, and then he laughs, because normally he would try and find a song that matched up to what he wanted to say, but there’s not really a song called ‘Hey, I Joined A Band’- or if there is, Will’s never heard it. 

There are funny rules about the singing. Will doesn’t really get it. He couldn’t just sing ‘I joined a band’ and expect it to go through, because it wouldn’t. But if he sang a cover of a song, for example, then his soulmate would hear it. If he sang his own song, his soulmate would hear it. 

That’s what Will is afraid of when he stands with the band at their first ever practise. He knows that his soulmate is awake- he can hear the distant sound of The Neighbourhood in his ears, and he knows that he’ll be able to hear what he’s about to sing. 

Maybe, he thinks, they’ll be upset. 

He hopes they won’t. 

The band play, and Will sings, and at the end, in the silence that follows, he realises that the Neighbourhood has stopped playing. 

“That was awesome, Will!” Lou Ellen says. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s grinning over her guitar, and Nyssa is smiling, too, from the piano. Connor is throwing a drumstick in the air and twisting it around his fingers, but there’s a smile on his lips too. Travis and Cecil congratulate him, too, but Will is barely listening as he focuses on his soulmate. 

It’s still quiet. It’s quiet as they practise again, and again, and two hours later it’s still quiet. 

But as Will goes to bed that night, he hears a soft tune playing in his ears. He doesn’t pay much attention to the lyrics- he knows that they’re not really what his soulmate wants to say. No, he smiles because he knows the song and he knows the title. 

‘Thank You’. 

No problem, Will thinks, and smiles. 

**** 

They write more songs. Will writes most of them, some with Nyssa, some with Lou. The Stoll brothers aren’t really interested in writing, and Cecil helps a little, but mostly focuses on bringing them all Sour Patch Kids and yelling “Go team!” just as they’ve worked out the perfect lyric. 

Six months and they have six songs. Six months after that, they’ve signed with a label. Six months after that, and there’s an album. 

Two months after that, and ‘I Just Want’ (Will’s first song, the one about his soulmate) is a massive hit. He wonders if his soulmate knows he wrote it. He wonders if his soulmate knows who he is, now, because a simple search for the band leads fairly quickly to Will’s name. 

To be fair, a lot of people email in and say that Will’s their soulmate. Clarisse La Rue, their fearsome manager, tells him that he has to get used to it. “None of them are,” she tells him, sniffing. “Just ignore it.”

Will doesn’t think he ever will get used to it. He hadn’t anticipated that his soulmate would suffer from this. After all, how will he ever find his soulmate now if everyone keeps telling him that they’re his soulmate? 

He doesn’t know who’s telling the truth. He supposes he could ask. “What song do you play at three every morning?” He asks one boy, and his cheeks turn pink. He leaves, and Will feels his chest drop. 

After that, he asks it more often. They all look embarrassed when he says it, and they slink off. Clarisse says she’s proud of him, but Clarisse is violent and Will kind of thinks she likes scaring people, so he doesn’t feel any better about what he’s doing. 

“They’re the ones who should feel bad,” Nyssa tells him, angry. Her arms are folded, and Will feels almost afraid. She’s a mechanic, or used to be, and she has the muscles for it still. People think she’s the drummer, usually, but she plays the piano like it’s an extension of her own body. 

They get along well. They all do- Will’s sort of surprised. Lou Ellen and Cecil clash the most, but Will’s pretty sure it’s just because they have crushes on one another and can’t stand it. 

None of them know who their soulmates are, and they get loads of questions about it in interviews, which Will can’t believe. In fact, he can’t really believe they get interviews at all, but they ask about Will’s love life a lot. Maybe it’s because he wrote ‘I Just Want’ or maybe it’s because he’s the lead singer. 

“Do you expect your writing will change after you meet your soulmate?” One interviewer asks. 

“Yes,” Will responds. “But I don’t just write about soulmates. Or I try not to, anyway.” It’s true- there’s a song about Will’s mother, one about Nyssa and her family, and Lou Ellen’s one is about her mental health. There’s also one that Travis and Connor helped him with, one about their parents’ love story. Will likes that one, and although it’s about soulmates, it’s not about about soulmates. It’s just about two people in love. “I mean, I have lots of things to say…” Will continued. “But after I meet them, I think I’ll write a few songs. I don’t know if I’ll share them, or not.” 

The interviewer clearly wants more, but Clarisse gives a death glare and she asks a question to Cecil, instead. 

Yeah. Will always refers to his soulmate as ‘them’ even though he knows for certain they’re a guy. His friends know that he’s gay, but he isn’t ready for the public to know yet. 

Sometimes it sucks, but Will doesn’t really know how to say the words ‘I’m gay’ to people and know that it’s going to affect things. 

He just doesn’t know. He bites his lip and tunes out the interviewer as his soulmates puts on some more Italian music. 

It’s soothing. 

**** 

Nico doesn’t join a band because his soulmate is in one. 

He joins a band because he’s always wanted to. He joins a band because he likes to sing. He joins a band because his soulmate’s words (his soulmate’s words about him) keep echoing around and around in his head and a song called ‘Thank You’ that has lyrics about drugs is the best he can do to respond. 

He joins a band. 

His sister tells him everyone in a band is either on drugs or just plain crazy, and Leo whoops and yells that “the only drug your hermano Nico is on is the natural high of life, baby!” and Nico sort of regrets his choice. 

Hazel laughs, though, and says she’s proud of him, and then she hugs him as he goes to band practise and he reminds her to do her homework, and she kicks him, and he misses Bianca so much it makes his chest physically hurt. 

His band consists of him, Leo, Percy and Jason. They don’t really know what they’re doing, but it’s okay, because Percy’s girlfriend and soulmate Annabeth yells at them when they don’t do enough, and Jason’s sister Thalia and friend Reyna turn up sometimes and laugh at them, and Percy gets so annoyed that he actually gets stuff done. 

It’s a messy system, but Nico thinks it kind of works because Jason and him write a song, and it sounds nice, and Percy doesn’t even realise it’s about him, which, like. That’s good, he guesses. 

Reyna does, though, and she gives him a look, but Nico pretends that he doesn’t notice it, and besides, he loves Reyna. He doesn’t really care. 

He thinks Hazel notices, though, but she’s too busy working up the courage to ask him about it to notice the hints he’s dropping about the fact he’s gay. 

His soulmate continues to sing songs. Nico hears The Song on the radio, and he almost drives off the road. He regains control of himself and the car, though, and pulls over and listens to it through. 

It sounds different when it’s not in his head. Less personal, maybe. 

The person on the radio says the name of the band, and says something about how this was the song’s fourth week on the charts. 

Forth week. Nico’s been hearing the song in his head for what he thinks is almost a year. 

He writes down the name of the band, and he goes home and Googles them. 

It says they’re American, and there’s a lead singer, Will Solace, and various other band members that truthfully Nico doesn’t care about much. 

He thinks that his soulmate is Will Solace. 

Maybe it’s someone else, though. Maybe this Will has a brother or a friend who listened to his song before it even came out, maybe he asked them for inspiration and they came up with this- came up with details about his Italian songs and that week in May that Nico doesn’t listen to any music in. 

Maybe. Maybe. 

He goes home, and he writes a song in return. He stares at it, stares at the words on the page, honest and truthful. 

They’re realer than anything he’s ever written before. 

He tries out the words in Italian before he sings them in English. Of course, they don’t rhyme and the rhythm is off, but he feels better saying them anyway. 

He won’t show the song to Jason, or to Percy, or to Leo. He won’t show it to anyone, because it’s like a piece of his soul, a piece of what makes him him. 

But he will sing it, once. For his soulmate. 

When the time is right. 

**** 

Two months pass. It’s almost a blur. Things are happening fast- they’ve got songs, now, and they have a record label, and Nico feels like he’s in a dream as Reyna hugs him and Hazel tells him he better not be on drugs and Percy, Jason and Leo give him a group hug and take a picture together. 

He hasn’t sung his song for his soulmate, although he has the words memorised. He listens to Will Solace’s band a lot, and he hears it in his head when they’re practising. He doesn’t know how to contact him, though, knows that he probably gets a thousand messages from people saying that they’re his soulmate, and doesn’t really know if he would contact Will if he could. 

The band is good for him. He sleeps better, and he feels better, too, and he gets less nightmares. 

They release a song. It hovers around the bottom of the charts, and they’re all happy, because, hey, this is the start of something. They can all feel it. 

They release an album. This song features Nico’s Percy song, and Nico was feeling sort of anxious about releasing it, because, hey, he feels like if anyone who knew enough about the whole Percy situation listened to it, they would know exactly who he was talking about. 

The Percy song goes to number one. Nico catches his soulmate listening to it, too, and he wonders if they’re thinking about how they heard it before it was released, if they do the same Googling he did, do the same maths and realise that yeah, they heard it before release date, and have the same crisis Nico did. 

Nico doesn’t think his soulmate is really a crisis guy, though. He doesn’t know why he thinks that- after all, how much can you get from someone’s music taste? But he can’t help but think that he’s a calm guy, pretty cheerful, generally. 

It’s when his soulmate is listening to the Percy song again that Nico finally gets up the confidence to sing his song.

He’s alone in the house he shares with Jason, and there’s a keyboard there, and so he goes to it and presses his hands on the keys and he sings. 

And his soulmate is quiet. 

And he finishes, and he takes a breath, and there’s almost a minute of silence before the same ‘Thank You’ song Nico played for him starts in his head.

It makes Nico smile. 

**** 

Will is on tour. Will is on tour. 

Will can’t believe it. He sings his songs every night, so loud he can’t hear fucking Mulan, and he listens to people cheering and lets his answering smile almost split his face in two. 

And he goes to bed, and in the morning he wakes up and he usually spends too long each morning thinking about his soulmate. 

He feels close. He feels closer than he’s ever been before. He heard that song, that one about the person pining over a guy with a soulmate, before it came out and got on the charts. And then he was listening to it and suddenly he heard that same voice on the track singing a song, soft and sweet, a hint of an Italian accent, and he burst into fucking tears. 

His soulmate had written him a song. A fucking song- a song that said thank you, that said I just want to know you, too, that said he was hurting but it was okay, because he was healing, and he knew that Will hurt too, sometimes- and gods, Will had wanted to find him so bad. 

But he was on tour, and besides, he didn’t know who his soulmate even was. 

He had googled the song his soulmate had written for him, Googled the lyrics and the band he was fairly sure his soulmate was a part of, but… Nothing. 

He felt pleased that the song was something private between him and his soulmate, but he also felt mad, because, hey. He just wanted to find the fucking song, because the melody was stuck in his head and he loved it, gods did he love it, and also- he just wanted to find his soulmate. 

He Googled the band from the original song, the pining one, and - well, two of the boys had soulmates they’d found, and one was Spanish, not Italian, but the other one… He’d written the pining song with one of the others, and he was Italian (or at least had an Italian last name) and Will had watched an interview with him and had heard the traces of Italian accent in his words. 

Nico Di Angelo. 

He was so close. So infuriatingly close. 

But he didn’t know how to contact him. He didn’t know if they were going on tour, or what, didn’t know if they even had plans beyond their first album. 

He started to say some things in interviews, saying he liked them, and hoped against hope that somehow, somewhere, Nico Di Angelo was hearing them and knew. 

**** 

Will Solace was listening to love songs. Nico felt equal parts pleased and irritated whenever he did. 

Pleased because he knew he was the cause of it, and irritated because, hey, it was pretty annoying to be sitting eating some cornflakes and have some melancholy music playing in his head that he couldn’t turn off. 

He was almost a hundred percent sure his soulmate was Will Solace, now. Firstly because he sang in the shower (or just sang around the house) and Nico was almost sure that that singing voice was the same one in the songs and in the interviews. Secondly, Annabeth had gotten all excited because Will had said he liked their music in an interview, and she thought it would be awesome publicity. 

Will had given the camera a look, a small smile that Nico wasn’t quite sure what to do with. 

He wanted to meet him. All of his reservations had vanished. He just wanted to find him, kiss him, tell him he was sorry for that week or so of silence where he was pretty sure Will had thought he was dead. 

In the end, it all came down to dumb luck. 

Leo was FaceTiming his sister on the couch, grinning at her and telling some story about how Nico was an idiot. Nico passed and yelled at him, and then Leo got in a huff and stomped off, leaving the phone with Nico. 

And then Nyssa had asked him about Leo’s birthday. She had an idea that they would do some surprise, that she would bring down some friends and their other brothers. 

Nico had given her his number, told the others, and hadn’t thought much of it beyond feeling like a slightly better friend than usual. 

He hadn’t known Nyssa was in a band. (That probably docked some friend points, now he thought about it.) 

He got ready for the party with no real sense of worry. He brought Leo to Percy and Annabeth’s, like Nyssa had asked, and they walk in to have about twenty people yell “SURPRISE!” as loud as they could manage. 

Nico felt surprised, all right. He stands there gaping at the sofa, because standing there right in front of him is none other than Will Solace. 

His fucking soulmate. 

He can’t hear anything. No music in his head, something that was rare, what with band practise and just general music listening, and he knew. Any remaining doubt vanished. 

Everyone else yells happy birthdays (or buenos cumpleaños, in Jason’s case, because he’s trying to be a good friend and speak Spanish around Leo, despite fucking it up almost constantly). 

Nobody notices that Nico is about to fall over. 

Happy birthday plays, and Nico knows for absolute certain, because he can hear it twice, once in his head, once in actual real life. 

Now he’s here, he doesn’t know what to do. He didn’t think that it would all happen like this. 

He didn’t think it would be at Leo’s fucking birthday part with a bunch of people standing around. 

And so he has to stand there and say happy birthday and watch as Leo hugs Nyssa and his other brothers, little Harvey and Jake, and then, finally, the party spills outside and it’s quieter inside the house. 

Will waits in the living room. Nico does too, and they both step forwards together. 

They’re close. Nico doesn’t know what to say. 

‘Hi, I’m Nico, are you my soulmate?’ doesn’t really seem right. 

“Hi,” Will says, and Nico whispers “hi” back. They laugh, together, and then Nico is hugging him despite his normal distaste for physical contact, and Will says: “I liked your song,” soft and quiet. 

“I liked yours,” Nico responds, and Will is grinning. 

“But,” he says, “that fucking Mulan.” 

Nico blinks. Oh. The Mulan. It always relaxes him, helps him go to sleep, and: “I thought you would be asleep,” he says. 

“Well, I always was! Until Mulan-“ But Will is laughing in a way that says he doesn’t really care much about Mulan. 

Nico’s mouth hurts. He’s smiling more than he thinks he’s ever smiled before. “Sorry,” he says, sort of serious, and Will’s smile dims. 

“You’re alright, aren’t you?” He asks. Nico nods, and Will exhales. “I mean, we need to talk- to do lots of things- I mean-“ he shakes his head. “I mean.” 

Nico is close to him, and he can smell mint and something else he can’t quite place. He knows he can barely breathe, and when Will talks he can hear the voice that sings the song that cares about him, cares about him and that stupid week in May and his Italian music and he swears under his breath in Italian and kisses him. 

And Will kisses him back, and it’s better than Nico thought it would be, better by far. 

It’s everything they’ve said already and everything they haven’t. It says I care and it says I wrote that song for you, and it says I’m happy you’re here, and Nico can feel his heartbeat in his toes and it doesn’t last long enough. 

Nico thinks: I could write so many songs for you, and he smiles. 

Will smiles right back, eyes wide and hands shaking a little. 

Nico wishes he could capture this moment in a bottle and keep it forever. 

“We have so many things to talk about,” Will says, but he sounds less certain than before. 

“Okay,” Nico says. “Okay.” 

They have the rest of their lives for talking. They have the rest of their lives for everything, and it’s so fucking brilliant that Nico can barely breathe, can barely stop his hands from shaking. 

The door bursts open. Jason comes in, says: “Nico?” before fully realising what’s going on. 

Nico wants to laugh as he sees Jason’s face change from curiosity to surprise to shock to- well, he doesn’t know what it is. 

“Hello, Nico and Not Nico,” Jason says. “Erm. I’m Jason.” 

“Will,” Will says, stepping back from Nico to shake hands. He looks mildly terrified- Nico can’t blame him. Jason looks like Captain America, muscles and all, and he’s looking at both Nico and Will with more anger than is possibly needed. 

Nico knows that he’s going to have a talk with Jason later about why he didn’t tell him about his soulmate, but right now, he’s too busy smiling. 

Will Solace is his soulmate. He’s just kissed his soulmate. 

He has the rest of his life with his soulmate. 

His soulmate. 

He catches snippets of songs- something about his smile, about his hands on the back of Nico’s neck, of the smell of him. Something about how he heard him singing to him, a song called ‘I Just Want’ that is sweet and beautiful and kind and made him fall in love. 

About the song he wrote in return, a thank you, a song that he knows he’ll never share with anyone but Will. A song for just them. 

He turns to Will, reaches out a hand, and they leave the room, going outside. Outside to Leo’s birthday party, knowing that it doesn’t really matter that they’re not alone, because, after all- they have the rest of their lives.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from ‘House of Gold’ by Twenty One Pilots.  
> Thanks for reading- I’ll probably add some more stuff to this, because I loved writing it and it was super fun. :)


End file.
